getting pops on burning audio cd's

On my HP cd writers, When I burn an exact copy
of audio cd's ( any brand , I get popping sounds on my speakers of the burned cd. This occurs on all diff brands of cd's -r, and even when I lowered the speed of the burn to 4x , It still has pops. Do you think my cd burner is defective or can it be my adaptec software, if it occurs each time I burn cds and even use diff brands of rewritable cd's? Please reply, Jason 8/15/01

First, verify that the CDR or CDRW disks you're using are rated for the speed at which you are burning them. Even though you lowered the speed to 4X, do the disks say specifically 4X or higher? If they don't say anything, burn them at 2X.

Second, are you having problems with all of your audio CDs or just ones that you've purchased recently, maybe in the last few months? Try burning an older CD. Rumor is that record companies are employing technology to ruin the quality of copies.

Not quite on topic, but I recently burnt a copy of a new commercial CD. All the music was there, but the end of track markers were all over the place, not one was at the true end of a track.
I had to rip all the tracks one by one to make a good copy.

That's what I usually do if I have problems; I rip all audio tracks 1 by 1 use "EAC" at http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/ and use error correction and other functions available in EAC to get great quality tracks. EAC displays a report of the quality of each track ripped. Once you have all the tracks ripped with no errors in them and you listen to them and find no errors, you can burn the tracks to CD.

If you still get bad CDs, then you may have a crappy burner or software/hardware settings could be wrong.